How to be a Storytelling Superhero 101, Part 2
Meet the ‘Justice League’ of Storytelling Ecosystems and build your superpowers
We are about ready to don our capes! In PART 1 of How to be a Storytelling Superhero 101, we explored the storytelling ecosystem phenomenon and seven key superpowers to watch. To take that next big step, let’s meet the social platforms we know (and may love), but this time as the Superheroes of storytelling ecosystems.
They are powerful because of their scale. But the more things change, the more they stay the same, no matter what the platform. What remains is that emotional/value connections must be established with your users. And what is exciting is that there are new ways to establish these connections across these platforms and as a part of your own, unique storytelling ecosystem.
The ‘Justice League’* of Storytelling Ecosystems
(*‘Justice League’ is used liberally. Technically, it’s the Justice League and the Avengers — I apologize in advance — I’m mixing heroes from both D.C. and Marvel Comics)
Twitter is Spider-Man
Twitter channels deep Telepathy aka Spidey sense.
Like Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spider-Man, Twitter itself broke through unexpectedly. Spidey is a superhero that came to his power not by birth, but through circumstance. And then Peter had to decide what to do with this power he now possessed. He had to learn “with great power there must also come great responsibility.”
Twitter is mass/or niche sentiment and collective knowledge on the fly. It is where hundreds of millions of people go to understand, enjoy, commiserate or applaud in real time, and share content and events they think is worthy of sharing. Twitter is uniquely open and transparent and it’s about the individual.
Twitter is the place to get the collective “Spidey sense” on events, people, what someone said, and on and on. Its Telepathy powers come from the collective action of its users. Increasingly, Twitter’s own algorithms are adding even more power to the collective telepathy (more opportunity here!). For instance, it’s getting more sophisticated at suggesting new people to follow. This happens through actual “follow” suggestions but also through tweet activity of your followers regarding who they are following and you are not.
Twitter’s timelines and custom follow lists also harbor two other key superpowers: Clustering and Nesting through the compelling story arcs that emerge from following the tweets; and Narrative Punch, as people digest what all those tweets add up to.
Like many news and media institutions, PRI has cultivated Twitter’s ecosystem to spread and support our storytelling and build repeat visits to PRI.org. PRI’s presence on Twitter is across multiple accounts (PRI and shows like The World or The Takeaway, Soundworks Podcast Network, talents, etc). We use Twitter’s immediacy to be apart/report/provide insight on large and small events as they unfold and join in/add value to the conversation (actually conversing and interacting is critical, it’s not just about posting articles). We also follow individuals and communities participating in those events. PRI also acts as a convener and brings people together on issues and topics of importance over time. We leverage Twitter’s Spidey sense to tell better stories about an important topic.
Case in point, our series on Cancer in the Developing World, and our hashtag #GlobalCancer.
PRI used Twitter to ‘listen’ to people already talking about cancer in the developing world. We learned about the important issues and pressing questions left unanswered and then tried to answer them.
We identified who cared or wanted to learn about cancer in Africa and India and then we reached out to many people, groups and organizations on Twitter to learn more. We discovered there wasn’t a galvanizing hashtag to bring conversation together, so PRI created #globalcancer. And then we told stories based on what we learned that were more powerful based on these insights. We delivered surprising analysis like this Cancer deaths versus Funding for Treatment/Prevention infographic that told part of the story and spread throughout social media to tap our own Narrative Punch.
Our newly created Global Cancer network spread our content far and wide, much further than the millions we could reach on our own. Through Twitter and Facebook, we linked to over 50 NGOs or individuals who helped us spread and tell compelling stories about Cancer in the developing world.
Facebook is Superman
Facebook possesses Superpower Scale.
Superman was born with great potential given his singular strengths and powers. Facebook, conceived with the nascent power of sharing and voyeurism, is at the center of a giant storytelling ecosystem. It’s the leader among leaders in social media like Superman is a leader among superheroes.
Facebook is where many of us spend more time than we care to admit. We share and devour little vignettes about friends and family (first day of school, a funny picture, etc.) and also consume news and other entertainment content. We graze on parts of stories over time and we create a narrative in our heads like, “Boy, Fred is really busy these days” to “that Syria situation is really complex and sucks.” Narrative Punch is evident, too, especially as people read/post specific stories. But a narrative arc across posts isn't always explicit or direct. Facebook has some time bound qualities, yet it isn't about the ‘right now’ either.
Facebook has achieved a first order of Nesting through its sharing strength. But it only goes so far. Everything draws you back to the news feed, when you may actually want to go deeper inside stories. What if you could customize your news feed by interests/sources? Or categorize your selections and shares? The current level of personalization is not as active/direct as a user might like. Facebook’s powerful, super-secret algorithm is doing a lot of this work but users don’t realize what they are missing. And all of us miss stories and parts of stories because posts go by, disappear during “refreshes” and we can’t keep up or because Facebook thinks they aren't relevant. This lack of flexibility is probably by design (and may have a lot to do with driving ad revenue) but something bigger is also missed in terms of creating even deeper value and engagement and Narrative Punch.
What is Facebook’s potential kryptonite? Its algorithm. If the news feed and the overall experience become less compelling based on poor algorithm decisions for what you see, and the lack of transparency related to those decisions, then Facebook’s immense power will weaken.
In terms of other Superpowers in training, Facebook has great potential to foster even more Co-Creation superpowers than it has achieved today; its role in the in the recent Ice Bucket challenge phenomenon points to this potential.
PRI is honing our Facebook presence constantly to understand how to increase reach to pri.org and partner sites and build social communities; the platform is critical to these efforts. We are also looking at Facebook as a partner platform to help people co-create more content with PRI and facilitate all kinds of actions on such as getting together to talk about issues to submitting story ideas. And as Facebook grows and expands internationally, this has particular interest to us given PRI’s global editorial and engagement focus.
‘Relevance’ trumps ‘Immediacy’ on Facebook
Instead of thinking how you can be posting what’s happening now, or thinking that the latest news is always the most important news, PRI uses Facebook to build Narrative Punch by adding something special to the conversation. Case in point: In December 2013, we told a story about the first time a policeman in Iceland ever shot and killed someone. The country freaked out. And it hit a nerve here in the US. People’s sharing went into overdrive, commenting, collecting more stories about people’s relationship with violence, guns in society, and the police. Traffic to PRI.org was considerable.
Then in August, the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri began to unfold. PRI brought back the Iceland story, and updated it. We checked in with the Icelandic Police to get an update on the shooting that occurred last December, specifically asking if there had been any other shootings since then. Answer: No, the police have not used firearms since. The story again struck a chord with our audience, this time driving social shares, conversation and collective storytelling into the stratosphere. Lesson: our stories are about value, relevance and timeliness but not immediacy, per se. For a news organization, this insight runs counter a news culture which prioritizes being right on the news with what is most recent. We still will be, but a story focused on events happening right now may not be the best or more valued post on Facebook.
YouTube is Batman
YouTube’s dominant Superpower is Co-creation.
Every minute, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, and many are user created. With more than 1 billion unique visitors to YouTube each month, YouTube is a staggering storytelling ecosystem that thrives on a combination of Co-Creation and Nesting and Clustering superpowers.
Similar to Batman, YouTube has leveraged its vast resources and experience (training) to get smarter and stronger with each uploaded video, over time. It has created a platform that many people post their videos to reach more people. And it uses powerful algorithms to shed light on something else you might (like the Bat Signal) millions of times a day aka clustering.
In many Batman stories, Gotham is a critical character. YouTube is essentially a collection of many distinct, engaged influential communities akin to many individual Gothams.
To engage productively, it’s important to be a member of a YouTube Community(ies) and avoid treating the ecosystem as just a distribution platform for YOUR community. Other Co-Creation dominant ecosystems include Instagram, Tumblr and Vine, and these share some of the same “communities within communities” qualities.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a YouTube to get some superpower Mo-Jo in Co-Creation, (and of course you can use these Co-Creation ecosystems to support your own efforts).
PRI has delved into Co-Creation through numerous projects including, Extra Credit.
“Extra Credit” is a regular feature on Studio360.org and our companion broadcast program and invites its audiences to flex their own creative muscles.
To spark the creativity of the people formerly known as the audience, we invite a notable guest artist to discusses the inspirations behind his/her own work. Then the guest assigns listeners a related challenge: write an original poem or story, take a photo, record a short music score, rewrite the lyrics to a song. Over the next month, we remind users of the challenge via broadcast and through promotion and engagement of like-minded digital communities. Users’ works are uploaded and featured on the show’s web site, where they can be viewed and commented on by the public. After a month, the guest artist returns to the studio to pick one or two favorites and contact those creators to discuss their works. The winning pieces are showcased online and on the air.
One of my favorites was Wes Craven’s challenge, “Scary Short Film Fest” to create 30 second horror flicks. We received hundreds of submissions and Craven remarked that the quality and creativity rivaled Project Greenlight.
Through challenges like these and similar projects, PRI has received thousands of good quality user generated submissions. Compared to general pages or stories, pages with co-created content tend to have higher engagement in terms of time spent on pages (upwards of +20%), even months after a project has officially closed. Our ‘creative constraints,’ such as limiting the length of submission or limiting the challenge to a set of PRI-provided assets that can be remixed/reworked, both help channel the creative juices of our co-collaborators and help promote higher quality curations and compilations of these works.
This isn't just about random content being uploaded; it’s about catalyzing a new collective whole. We evaluate the success of an Extra Credit or other challenges by the number of submissions, percentage quality of submissions, overall reach (geographic, demographic), material for our program and of course traffic and time spent on site.
The next frontier will be figuring out how facilitate quality creative works that can be completed exclusively through mobile devices and how to move beyond using the large storytelling ecosystem players as almost exclusively promotional vehicles to becoming “places” for creative works to reside in a way that is complementary to PRI.org.
LinkedIn is Iron Man
LinkedIn’s dominant superpower is Cool Gadgets and Tools.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Tony Stark is a gifted engineer, captain of industry and rabble-rouser. In the course of being kidnapped, he has a life-threatening chest injury. During this ordeal, his captors attempt to compel him to invent a new weapon of mass destruction. But Tony outwits them and instead creates a superpower suit to “fix” his heart and escape captivity. He becomes Iron Man in the process. Tony takes a liking to helping people and regularly adds new tools to his suit of armor to improve its effectiveness and enhance his ability to moonlight as a Superhero.
LinkedIn’s strength comes from its focus on storytelling combined with “Tools and Gadgets.” And its arsenal of tools would make Iron Man verklempt.
LinkedIn began as a platform to manage your network and career through your online profile/resume and recruitment platform for employers. With its acquisitions of Pulse and the launch of the blogging Influencers platform, LinkedIn now creates and deliver a distinctive content universe (Narrative Punch). It combines tools that deliver on Telepathy, as well as Nesting and Clustering, derived through content sharing among networks and connections. For example, users consume stories, build networks both through the central LinkedIn site/app and through its specialized mobile apps, such as LinkedIn Connected and LinkedIn Job Search. Together, these tools help support more regular connection with the service and thereby also helping users advance their career. People are the currency/product within LinkedIn.
Just as Tony Stark keeps tweaking his suit to be more powerful and useful, so do LinkedIn users (and employers) to achieve larger, personal career goals.
For content players like PRI, focused ecosystems like LinkedIn can be harder to play in because they can feel closed. After all, LinkedIn is about career advancement. Certainly PRI has seen growth in sharing of our articles within LinkedIn over the last year. We will be exploring how best to interact with the LinkedIn platform as we tackle topics such as economic development and women in the next year.
Back on PRI.org, ecosystems like LinkedIn and their arsenal of power of tools prompt questions for us to consider. Among them, how and whether we should develop our own Tools and Gadgets (or who to partner with and why), that are unique, or add deep value to our own ecosystem? These questions are tricky as a player that excels in the storytelling side of the equation. But it is evident that these Tool/Gadget storytelling ecosystems can elevate the value of those stories in people’s lives and can help relate and express new stories.
We will be exploring action tools in the next year by testing deeper engagement beyond the requisite, liking, sharing and commenting. For example, through a recently announced Knight Foundation Prototype Fund grant, we will be testing ways to help people get together, volunteer, give and potentially even buy products that seem like a natural fit given the subject of an article. Stay tuned.
Pinterest is Wonder Woman or the Green Lantern
Pinterest possesses deep nesting and clustering superpowers.
Pinterest is Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern because these superheroes come from families or clans. Wonder Woman comes from the island of Themyscira, where her Amazon goddess sisters live (and she calls on them to contribute to her success). Even more explicit is the Green Lantern, who is actually part of a team of superheroes, an interstellar law enforcement agency called the Green Lantern Corp.
Like these clans, communities of interest have taken root inside Pinterest. Pinners use the power of pinning and boards that are akin to “lassos of truth” or “rings of light” to collect related images and inspiration representing their interests and dreams. As Pinners create bespoke Boards with millions of pins, users benefit from their work as associations between content pieces are built through the algorithm and then reinforced again through user interactions. As a platform, Pinterest fosters deep discoverability based on its Telepathy. Users pull together their own bespoke aggregations of content – Pinterest has been called the Intentions Graph of the web – what people hope to do or helping people organize around things and actions they love. The opportunity moving forward, particularly for organizations like PRI is to discover the most effective ways to leverage the nesting and clustering strengths of Pinterest to foster new stories and participation and connection to our stories.
PRI has just begun to leverage Pinterest and will do much more in the coming year, especially given our recently announced journalism and engagement initiative, Across Women’s Lives, which is a massive journalism and engagement effort to highlight the power of women around the world to strengthen societies.
Flipboard is Captain Atom or Plastic Man
Flipboard leverages Morphing Superpowers.
Flipboard is a tablet app that has pioneered a new way to consume, post and share content. Flipboard’s superpowers are built on elegantly compressing stories and lots of experiences into an efficient and appealing design. Flipboard and other similar services like Reverb or Google Play Newsstand are about changing the shape and organization (of stories) a la Plastic Man or Captain Atom.
FlipBoard helps you to read all your favorite stories on your tablet from sources your select sources and social networks. You can also create your own ‘publications’ from content you curate and then publish within FlipBoard. Beginning in text, the service now incorporates audio and video and allows for bespoke compilations and discovery.
On Flipboard, PRI features full sections for PRI.org, Studio 360 and The Takeaway. Each are automatically updated along with smaller manually curated collections or “magazines” that focus on particular subjects that our productions have covered regularly, such as immigration from our Global Nation from The World or the American Icons series from Studio 360. This curation allows us to reach people who are interested in these particular areas of focus and highlight our coverage in a unique way.
On our own mobile site and as we consider app strategies, we are considering our own morphing tactics. We are delving deeply into better understanding how engagement between various forms of content, particularly text, video and audio impact the experience and level of engagement on our site and what role other ecosystems such as the Flipboard app play in that relationship.
Another morpher is Circa, an app that builds narrative summary above the individual story so that people can follow developments more seamlessly (Sumly that was acquired by Yahoo! and now the driver of the Yahoo News Digest mobile app takes a similar tact). For a comparison of these apps, see this article from CIO.com.
As new compelling narrative forms emerge, it is likely more sites, apps and content providers will play with morphing because this superpower can add new Narrative Punch across developing stories and offer insights that lists of stories cannot.
Kickstarter & Indiegogo are Captain Americas
People organize and come together to make impact.
Captain America started off as a mere mortal and needed help from others to achieve more. In fact, he was a bit frail and only through a special Super-Soldier Serum and related treatment along with rigorous training, was he was able to attain superhuman strengths and capabilities. A brilliant tactician, he inspires based on his vision, takes a stand for what he believes in and brings out the best in others.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the two major players in crowd-funding are becoming Captain Americas. These platforms have invented new ways to raise money to launch products, content, services of value to people. By their nature, they are also good vehicles to build networks of stakeholders who are connected and emotionally invested in the success of projects.
Successful projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo leverage these powerful storytelling ecosystems and lead people to back their powerful visions. They align their own assets to bring people directly into the suspense of the story. Enough people need to make the decision to fund and help them come into existence in the first place. Projects need demonstrate clear leadership and communicate along the way. Investors in crowd-funded projects become direct participants and stakeholders in getting projects off the ground; they become part of the launch team.
A good example of capitalizing on the organizing and leadership superpower of Kickstarter is public radio’s Planet Money’s T-Shirt project led by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/planetmoney/planet-money-t-shirt.
“Planet Money is making a very special t-shirt. A t-shirt unlike any other. A t-shirt that can tell you the story of its own creation.”
It began as a campaign to raise $50,000 to tell the story of the Planet Money T-shirt — the journey of how these shirts are made and ends up on our doorstep. The T-shirts were ‘bought’ by the public, manufactured and shipped to the project backers. People would follow as the stories of their shirts as they unfolded, including when they reached their final destination arriving at the funders’ homes. They raised over $590,000 from 20,200+ backers – certainly a home run in executing on a freemium revenue model. Twenty seven updates were fed on the Kickstarter page and the full story was told on a special area on Planet Money/NPR’s website, http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title. Delivered in five chapters, the actual story of the T-shirt spanned ecosystems and platforms: broadcast, podcast (audio), web video, infographics, text, and using Kickstarter, Facebook, Twitter, as well as Planet Money and This American Life ecosystems.
It’s not easy to mount an effort with this intensity of storytelling punch. That said, thousands of projects have been funded through crowd-funding by entrepreneurs, engineers, and artists telling and engaging people in their genesis story. They have developed hundreds or thousands of stakeholders who feel invested in their outcome — a superpower, indeed.
One last note: the rise of content+commerce as storytelling platforms
It wasn't that long ago when consumers only valued content from ‘content-only’ providers, but this is changing fast. Now people increasingly value content, information and stories, no matter what their origin. Do you care that it was CitrusLane.com who helped you solve the diaper rash or WebMD? Services/Commerce sites are also increasingly becoming storytelling ecosystems. These storytelling environments rely a great deal on storytelling through curation: “What is the career, life, home, health, “look”, family life you want? Let us help you get there through this curated set of products and services.” As such, their superpowers are more “focused,” and that focus gives them the power to delight and go deep to create value not unlike LinkedIn.
What can be difficult for storytelling players like PRI is to figure out is how to access these ecosystems as they are often ‘closed’ to outside content/interaction (unless they are selling your content). We will continue to explore opportunities in this emerging area in the coming year.
Consumer product or service companies can have a much easier go at it if their products align with the content+commerce thrust of the player in question.
Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins spoke to this type of ecosystem as an “Internet Trifecta =Critical Mass of Content + Community + Commerce” when discussing Houzz as part of her Annual review of the Internet. Houzz began as a clipping site of home products and design to developing robust magazine-like features on home and design delivered to you and through its applications, discussions, professional reviews and now, building commerce into the site, if you like that lamp, now you can just click and buy.
Amazon is Dr. David Banner but could quickly become the Incredible Hulk
Ironically, the biggest potential commerce+community+commerce storytelling ecosystem is Amazon. The recent announcement that The Washington Post will now become ‘a product’ on Amazon, including on Kindle suggests some potential movement – time will tell. Amazon’s massive e-commerce strength is legendary but it’s not currently leveraging its potential storytelling ecosystem assets, especially in the areas of co-creation and narrative punch.
Amazon has certainly invested in creating platforms that feature outside content through Amazon Prime, Instant Video and Kindle. And some of those user-generated reviews are priceless. Through brute strength, it’s also commissioning original programming with original television-like series delivered through its platforms while at the same time its publishing arm has developed webisode programming for mysteries and romance genres. Its telepathy in suggesting products based on purchase history is legend. How The Washington Post begins to influence and intersect with Amazon’s storytelling ecosystem will be interesting to observe.
How aggressively will Amazon embrace ‘collective’ storytelling and use all its telepathy into full-fledged content/story arcs and supporting co-creation?
Just think if they decide to go all in, what could be possible.
Up, Up and Away!
In this ‘always on’ world when literally thousands of services live in your pocket and will increasingly respond to your life in new and intuitive ways, we can all feel like we have new found superpowers. Looking at your work and brand through a storytelling ecosystem lens can help you evaluate current strategies and prioritize your efforts. You can respond more effectively to people’s limited time to engage across the Superhero storytelling ecosystems and draw people more effectively into your own collective universe. You can improve your organization’s ability to foster a deeper sense of meaning, connection, togetherness and usefulness that plays on storytelling superpowers for your own benefit.
So if you haven’t already, put on your cape, channel your inner superhero, jump in, experiment, learn and tap the collective storytelling force to make the world a better place, one story at a time!
